Western leaders are currently fixated by the need to keep the Ukraine crisis going on as long as possible, in order that, when it all comes apart, somebody else has to deal with the horrible consequences.
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack
This photo is a work of an employee of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, taken or made as part of that person’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, it is in the public domain
Last week’s post generated a lot of interest and a lot of comments, and, as often in the past, the comments made me realise that there were aspects of what I had discussed that might be worth developing further. So here we are again this week.
In talking about likely western reactions to a defeat in Ukraine, I have necessarily concentrated so far on the more ”hardware” end, both of the spectrum of potential endings, and of the bright ideas to avoid, or at least minimise, the likely consequences of those endings. I’ve talked about very practical issues of science and technology, of recruiting, training and deploying military manpower, of producing, deploying and supporting military equipment, and so on. I think my point has been sufficiently made: there is no realistic possibility of western rearmament now, irrespective of the amount of money spent, nor of challenging Russian domination of the security agenda in Europe. I have yet to see any reasoned attempt to show that this argument is wrong or inadequate.
But of course that’s only part of the story. If international political decisions were taken according to a rational analysis of the balance of objective forces, the world would be a great deal simpler and easier to predict than it is, and international relations theory might have more utility. But in fact, pressures influencing how governments behave in crises differ enormously from case to case, and often have little connection with objective factors as we understand them even at the time, or indeed the factors that we consider in retrospect to have been objectively important. Thus, one of the most common reactions of historians dredging through the papers of the past is, They can’t really have thought that, can they? Well, yes they did.
A few examples. During the Spanish Civil War, for example, the British government was obsessed by the fear that that conflict could turn into a major European war, a confrontation between the Soviet Union on the one hand, and Germany and Italy on the other, at the head of the two rival Spanish factions, with the British and French caught in the middle. To prevent this, a lot of its diplomatic energy went into trying to establish non-intervention agreements. This concern—although it was the main preoccupation of British diplomacy at the time—has been silently excluded from popular histories of the period, except as a way of slighting the alleged weakness of the western powers in the face of the rising Fascist threat. A few decades later, one of the major reasons for the abortive Suez operation was the fear that Nasser—one of the first “new Hitlers” who have so obsessed the western political class since 1945—had to be brought down, to avoid Soviet-backed chaos and violence spreading throughout the whole of North Africa. And at the end of the Cold War I recall being taken around the newly constructed Air Force Headquarters in Pretoria, built well below ground and hardened against the nuclear attacks that were expected from Soviet and Cuban aircraft, spearheading the invasion of South Africa. (This could go on for pages, of course.)
In some cases, decisions were taken which were known or feared even at the time to be mistakes, because the alternative was even worse. A classic is the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. We know now that the Politburo was deeply divided on the question, and that the eventual decision to invade was regarded as no more than the less worse of two alternatives. A few years later, the Argentinian regime decided to invade the Falklands, which with a little patience they would have got back anyway, while the British sent a military force to the other end of the world to get back territories that they had been trying to give away. But the two military operations were launched one after the other because the alternative was that first one, and then the other, government would otherwise have fallen from power. No wonder people in Whitehall in those days would gather in corridors asking each other This isn’t really happening, is it? But it was.
For that matter, the historical record may show bizarre gaps where you might reasonably expect to find explanations. Historians are starting to look through the files of western governments from the early 90s, and find to their surprise that there was very little interest in, or discussion of, NATO expansion. This is indeed a reflection of the time: there were many other more pressing issues to worry about, and in any case, with the 2 plus 4 talks, the delicate subject of Soviet forces still stationed in a NATO country and the question of ex-Soviet nuclear forces in Belarus and Ukraine, it was hardly the time to piss off the Russians. Oh, there were a few people with fantasies of rolling towards the Russian frontier, but they weren’t influential. The default view was: leave that one until we’ve dealt with everything else, then maybe we’ll see. And then, whilst expansion subsequently consumed a lot of time and effort, and became almost the sole justification for NATO’s continued existence at one point, the emphasis (almost the obsession) was with technical issues like defence reform projects. Questions about Russian reactions were raised from time to time, but batted irritably aside. After all, what were the Russians going to do about it? Indeed, the superficiality of the debates in organisations like NATO has to be heard to be believed (there are structural reasons for this but it would take too long to go into them here.) Similarly, the discussions before the 1999 attack on Serbia were almost exclusively about preserving NATO’s public image and credibility in the face of increasing criticism and ridicule.
I mention all this because the mistakes of the past are often a reasonable guide to the potential mistakes of the future. There is no reason to suppose that the West and its leaders are any more capable now of a rational analysis of the current situation along the lines I suggested last week, than they ever were in the past. I cannot imagine the Secretary-General of NATO looking around the table at the next Atlantic Council meeting and saying with a sigh “well, ladies and gentlemen, we do seem to be buggered. What, if anything, can we do about it?”
It would be interesting to be a Russian listening device for such a meeting, and I have a shrewd suspicion about what that device might hear. Nothing of substance, for a start. The main focus for the foreseeable future will be individual and collective self-exculpation and self-justification. There is no chance of any serious discussion or analysis, and any such attempt would rapidly uncover unbridgeable and dangerous divides on a whole series of subjects. So the concentration will be on words, and on some kind of statement that makes the best of a bad job, and suggests that if black is not white, then at least it’s a certain shade of grey. Thus, a lot of the energy that should go into seeking solutions will go into playing with words instead.
So everybody will agree that “NATO is fundamental to our collective security.” Some will want to add “continued” before “collective,” some will want to add “and will remain so” at the end. Some will prefer “for the foreseeable future.” The new member states will want a special reference to them: others might be against it. There will have to be a carefully-judged reference to the commitment of the United States, saying neither too much nor too little. There will have to be another carefully judged reference to Russia. “Condemn the unprovoked invasion,” will be easy enough, but how to handle a government in Kiev that has acceded to Russian demands and is asking the West to leave? What do you say if Zelensky is no longer President? And there will be furious arguments between those who want to make some kind of reference to Ukraine one day being a member of NATO, and others who think not only that the time for such assertions is past, but that it’s also needlessly provocative. And so on. Days will be consumed with such arguments.
Oh, there will be a little action, if you can call it that. Working Groups will be formed to report by 2028, under some such rubric as “A Stronger NATO after Ukraine.” There will be furious debates over terms of reference and allowable conclusions, as well as pointless arguments about the involvement of outside experts, and “civil society.” There will be theatrical and carefully worded declarations about increases in defence spending, if something can be found to spend it on, and promises with footnotes about increasing the size of forces if that is actually possible. All this could go on for weeks, and even months, and won’t produce anything worth a row of tombstones. And that, I’m afraid, is what Ambassadors and Ministers are gong to find themselves actually doing, towards the end of the gravest crisis the West has known since 1945.
To understand why this is likely to be so, we need to look at how politics as a job (it’s not a “profession”) is actually conducted. Essentially, it”s about climbing the greasy pole, avoiding responsibility for disasters and taking the credit for successes. (Yes, once were statesmen, but that’s a long time ago.) The greatest survival skill is to avoid being held responsible for anything: many political problems resemble unexploded bombs, and the key to survival is not to be there when they go off. The classic modern instance of knowing when to run away is David Cameron’s resignation after the Brexit referendum fiasco. An honourable man would have resigned out of shame: Cameron resigned to avoid having to take responsibility for the chaos that followed the referendum result, and, extraordinarily, made a political comeback as Foreign Secretary only a few years later, dancing nonchalantly over the political corpses of his successors.
So the first priority in politics is personal survival. Even now, one imagines, research assistants must be using Chat GPT to write draft chapters of self-exculpatory Ukraine memoirs. It wasn’t me. I wasn’t there. Decisions were taken by others. I believed what others told me. The guilty should be identified and made to suffer. How could we have known? If only they had listened to me. And then of course, Nobody would listen to my secret plans for winning the war. Nobody could have tried harder than I did to help Ukraine. If only others had done the same. It’s all their fault. And so for some time now, public initiatives floated by western leaders have not been intended to win an un-winnable war, but rather to situate themselves favourably for the epic blood-letting that will follow it. And this is political blood we’re talking about, not the trivially human kind.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the greatest political skill is timing, and thus that western leaders are currently fixated by the need to keep the crisis going on as long as possible, in order that, when it all comes apart, somebody else has to deal with the horrible consequences. At some level, western leaders understand that the future is going to be a lot worse than the present. For now, it’s still all rather exciting and morally agreeable: western politicians can play at being war leaders and striking heroic poses, without any risk. But the shadows are already closing in, and nobody wants to be a national leader when difficult and even humiliating decisions have to be taken. So if things can just be nudged along another year, perhaps eighteen months, then someone else will have to pick up the pieces. And anyway, a miracle might happen. If you are still relatively young as a politician, then getting out now and leaving others to deal with the consequences of Ukraine is quite a good career move. Mr Macron, from the depths of his 20% approval in the opinion polls, has let it be known that he stands ready to return and save the nation in 2032, when he will be eligible to run for President again.
It’s important also to position yourself correctly in terms of your party. Now that there are no more substantive political controversies, this may simply mean being part of the right faction, or following a currently fashionable discourse. But it usually also implies keeping on the right side of the power-brokers in the party, and making sure that your efforts do nothing to harm your party’s electoral chances. To be a western national leader in two or three years time is to going to be very dangerous indeed, and if you take decisions about Ukraine with results that damage your party, that may well be the end of your career, and quite abruptly at that.
Now you may uncomfortably feel that something is missing from the list of political incentives and pressures, and you would be right. It could be described as the Outside World. Broadly speaking, everything I’ve just discussed assumes that things that are decided in western political fora have no real consequences if they go wrong. The important issues are who wins the argument, which institutions are strengthened as a result, and how the results, whatever they may be, are (inevitably) portrayed as a success. So you will meet people who see NATO’s Afghanistan deployment as a success because it proved that the alliance could successfully deploy out of area, that its members could work together under combat conditions, and that it was capable of defining a consistent military strategy. Yes, it all went to rats, but it wasn’t our fault: the Afghans were responsible for that. And so today you’ll find people arguing that NATO’s role in Ukraine has been a success because look at all those new members. The last time a government was really brought down by a foreign policy crisis of its own devising was probably Suez in 1956 and then Algeria in 1958, although the latter was a hopelessly complicated mixture of domestic politics and foreign failure. Lyndon Johnson renounced an attempt at a second mandate in 1968, but that owed much more to internal US politics than to the situation on the ground.
Since that time, western political leaders have enjoyed effective impunity in all their overseas policies and initiatives. Nothing they do, in the end, really matters: they suffer no consequences for it. It follows that when western leaders strike poses, threaten sanctions or military action or make hostile speeches, they never really take into account how the subjects and targets of these actions might feel, because in the end it doesn’t matter. What can they do, after all? It’s more important to get headlines and clicks for making blood-curdling threats to Russia that you know will never be carried out, than to actually do or say something constructive or useful. The political rewards go to the most intransigent and the most extreme, not to the most reasonable and constructive. All ingrown political systems tend to this weakness, but the current western political system, full of ignorant ideological clones mumbling the same platitudes, is as serious a case as any in world history, because the omnipresence and power of the single western discourse make sensible debate (or debate of any kind really) effectively impossible. I don’t think this aspect of the problem has been given nearly enough emphasis: as I’ve argued before, there is a terrible lack of any alternative discourse, which is not as unthinkingly pro-Russian, for example, as the dominant discourse is unthinkingly anti-Russian, but is genuinely axed upon facts and concern for western interests.
By extension, therefore, the western political system has a complete blind spot about the possible practical reactions of others to its own words and actions. They are simply not taken into account, because taking them into account would imply that there are potential restrictions on our freedom of action, and hence our collective ego, which is something we are not prepared to accept. Therefore we ignore them, and are surprised when aeroplanes start crashing into tall buildings, for example. The bloody attacks in Europe in 2015/16 in retaliation for European military activities against the Islamic State in Syria were not unexpected, and indeed experts warned European states to be careful, but such warnings were nonetheless dismissed as “Islamophobia,” and so not acted upon.
More than any for other reason, this is why the West has effectively been negotiating with itself since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, if not before. As I’ve indicated, the whole NATO expansion saga shambled along without taking actual expressed Russian sentiments or likely Russian feelings into account at all, and future historians, grimly working their way through the documents of the era, will no doubt be astonished at the superficiality of the “debate” on those issues, just as on others. But of course to take potential Russian reactions into account—for all that you might think it was common prudence, actually—would be to accept possible constraints on NATO’s freedom of action, which the collective ego of the organisation and the West simply could not contemplate. Who were the Russians to tell us who could or could not join NATO? And anyway, what were they going to do about it? So even now, the “debate” in Brussels is about what type of peace treaty “we” could accept, and what kind of peace treaty “we” are going to impose on the Russians. We haven’t quite got used to the idea that it is they who will be deciding and not us.
At least during the Cold War, the two sides had to take account of each other’s potential reactions, because the possible results of ignoring them included the end of the world. For the last thirty-odd years this hasn’t been the case, and the results of the West being wrong could in general be ignored. What’s worse is that this period has coincided with an extreme radicalisation and massive strengthening of the West’s ideologies of social and economic Liberalism. During the Cold War, the range of political opinions in western states was much wider than it is now and only hopeless ideologues and politicians with nothing else to say really saw the confrontation in starkly ideological terms. Indeed, a lot of effort went into trying to build bridges, and, even in the 1980s, the official line was that if a war were to start it would probably be by accident.
But in spite of the more recent conviction that Russia is a weak and declining power, the West feels more hatred and hostility towards that country than in the past. The triumph of intolerant social and economic Liberalism leads to the disposition to treat as enemies, and actively seek to destroy, nations that do not conform to this model. I discussed the status of Russia as a kind of “anti-Europe”, or at least anti-Brussels, in an essay some time ago. Russia is and has been for some time an anomaly: a state which should have followed the Gadarene rush towards a secular, rationalist, ahistorical, acultural society but unaccountably has not done so, and shows no interest in doing so. Such a state can be comfortably presented as a dim relic from the past, about to fall apart, and no doubt harbouring a population, who, if they could only make their voices heard, would demand a society like ours. In the meantime, we could complacently ignore what the present ruling class of Russia, presumed to be senile, out of touch and repressive, actually thought or did. And then Ukraine happens.
Western elites have always been worried and nervous about Russia. This has little to do with geopolitics or history, about which they are in general profoundly ignorant, but much more to do with the traditional trope of the Barbarians from the East, with the country’s sheer size and dazzling variety, and its strange historical mixture of high culture and brutal repression. To the burgeoning European liberal democracies of the later nineteenth century, Russia’s absolute monarchy was an embarrassment: it was the Saudi Arabia of its day, except much larger and more powerful. And the Revolution, Stalin and the Gulags and the takeover of Eastern Europe after 1945 did nothing to burnish the country’s image. But then, even if they had the numbers and the geography, it was thought, they didn’t have the military capability. And then Ukraine happens.
Beneath the surface hostility and contempt after the end of the Cold War, western elites were always afraid of Russia, partly for the irrational motives discussed above, partly because it was believed to have a ruthless and aggressive government, armed after all with nuclear weapons. But at the same time the internal dynamics of the West, and especially of NATO, meant that this confused and contradictory fear could not actually be articulated in any way that everybody would agree with. Nonetheless, it was bubbling under the surface from Georgia in 2008, which appeared to confirm the worst fears privately expressed in Brussels: “Putin” was trying to recreate the Soviet Union, of which he had once been a faithful servant. The revolt in the East of Ukraine in 2014, manifestly provoked by Putin in the eyes of Brussels, was generally seen as confirmation of this hypothesis. The ceasefire and disengagement arrangements negotiated between Kiev and the rebels, and summarised in the Minsk “Accords,” appeared to offer at least a breathing space to build up the defences of Ukraine so that it could deter, or if necessary resist, another attempted Russian attack. But now that policy has failed, and after Ukraine, where will “Putin” turn next? And how to stop him?
Insofar as it’s possible to describe the mentality of the western ruling class towards Russia at the moment with any clarity at all, it’s a bizarre mixture of unreasoning fear, hatred, incredulity and almost catatonic incapacity to conceive the future. The last is perhaps the most important, because nothing in the professional experience, or for that matter the education, of western rulers has prepared them for a situation where they are manifestly inferior militarily and economically to a hostile power, and there is nothing they can do about it. Like a small animal confronted with an unknown menace, they have no idea whether to run or whether to hide. So let’s look finally at some of the ways in which this poisonous and unstable situation might develop.
For as long as possible, the West will try to keep everything on the verbal level, which is the simplest one, and to avoid taking any firm decisions. (Indeed, there are serious doubts whether the western political system, as currently structured, is capable of taking firm decisions anyway.) As I’ve suggested, we can expect a cloud of verbiage designed to disguise the lack of anything to do. Good old standbys would include setting up a Lessons Learned team, or a Future of NATO Working Group developing a new Comprehensive Concept. All this has been done before, especially after 1989: nobody now remembers any of the resulting clever ideas, mostly because they amounted to “let’s keep doing what we’ve always done.” But that’s not possible this time, and not even our current leaders are dumb enough to think it is.
Another good standby is a repackaging of existing projects and plans under new names. For more than twenty years now, NATO has been working on missile defence projects, with mixed results. The original idea was primarily to defend against possible attacks from Iran or similar potential enemies, but it’s likely that the whole project will be dusted off, given a new name and status and marketed as a way of defending Europe against the new generation of Soviet missiles. This is impossible, of course, but it looks good, and is superficially impressive if you are totally ignorant of missile technology, as western leaders generally are. The alternative—of admitting that Europe is defenceless against such missiles—is politically impossible. And I wouldn’t rule out a proposal from Brussels to start negotiations to outlaw such missiles and technologies, asking the Russians to give up their own current systems against the promise that we won’t develop our own, some time. NATO forces will be given new names, new exercises will be scheduled, new commanders appointed, new collaborative R and D programmes announced, if not necessarily implemented.
All this is intended to provide the appearance of action when none is, in fact, possible. I don’t say this just to mock, although a little mockery may be in order here, but to point out that an organisation like NATO, widely dispersed geographically, made up of nations of wildly varying sizes, with wildly varying strategic situations and interests, is going to be led, as it always is, to the Least Common Denominator and will have to make the best of it. If NATO still had substantial forces, a military-industrial base, significant equipment holdings and recent experience of large-scale operations, then the situation would be clearer and there would be more possibility of finding something useful to do. But it doesn’t and there isn’t.
This is likely to provoke an extremely dangerous and unpredictable situation. Mixed with the fear of Russia, after all, is the fear of the security void at the heart of Europe that the end of NATO would leave. The problem is that the reasons why various European nations, especially smaller ones, think NATO is useful to them, are generally mutually contradictory and cannot be articulated in public. So our notional Russian listening device would hear again and again that “we must show our populations that NATO is still relevant,” even if no-one is exactly sure how to do this, and parades and speeches will only accomplish so much. The danger, of course, is that someone will do something really silly.
NATO has never been called upon to take a really critical collective decision in its entire history, but even decisions of less importance (such as the stationing of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe in the 1980s) have been very divisive. The 1999 Kosovo campaign almost brought a much smaller organisation to breaking point. The chances of anything more than a purely performative set of actions this time are about zero, the more so since the gaping strategic differences over Ukraine that are currently kept concealed will start to become increasingly evident. And more and more people with access to the elites will start wondering what, in that case, NATO is actually for. Even within the elites, people will start to ask why, if the US can no longer be used as a political counterweight to Russia (quite apart from having a nutcase as President), the transatlantic link should be continued. At that point, it’s pretty much game over. And that could be very dangerous indeed.
At the highest strategic level, European states all have an interest in not being bullied or intimidated by a resurgent and angry Russia. Since the Russians will be looking to establish a new security order in Europe that suits their needs, this is entirely possible. The problem is that not all European states will feel equally concerned about a strong and hostile Russia: many will have other and more important priorities. And even if states closer to Russia will understandably feel more nervous, it’s not obvious that a weak and divided group of countries can be of much mutual support to each other, and the US will not be in a position to do more than gesticulate.
The fact that the Russians probably have no territorial designs on Western Europe actually makes things more difficult, not less. If a conventional military confrontation were likely, then states like Poland and Rumania could build up their forces a little, and have limited contingents from other countries on their soil. But even then, it’s clear from the Ukraine experience that the Russians would simply use their superiority in missiles and drones to destroy western forces, together with their headquarters, logistic and repair depots, transport systems and government structures, without any risk of reprisal. But that’s not the problem: a weak and divided collection of countries with very different strategic situations and priorities, sitting at varying distances from a major military power, is going to have to find some way of preserving as much of their freedom of political manoeuvre as possible. Yet this is almost certainly going to be on a national, or at least multilateral, basis, simply because the situations are so different. In this context, we’re not talking about war, but the use of military forces as cards on the table in any political bargaining, and every state will have a different collection of cards. Some may have none.
So for countries bordering Russia, or near it, building up ground forces somewhat, and preparing defensive fortifications could make sense as a gesture supporting political independence. It’s hard to see, though, why Belgium or Portugal should do the same. Countries further away will want to invest in assets to patrol their air and maritime borders: again, not to fight, but to provide visible indications of sovereignty. The British and French nuclear systems—perhaps the only genuinely powerful political factors in European defence—are going to have to play a rather different kind of role in the future, but at the moment we can’t say what that will be.
It’s hard to see any of this being centrally organised, or indeed organised at all. Some small countries will drift towards an accommodation with Russia because they see it as in their best interests. Others will try to preserve more independence, perhaps through ad hoc alliances. NATO, and to an extent the EU, will become ghost organisations, increasingly cut off from the real security questions that will be increasingly re-nationalised.
Such a transition will be enormously difficult and dangerous, and there will be furious resistance to it by those unwilling to leave fantasy land. The conviction that if you only make the money available everything can be bought will take a long time to disappear, as will parallel fantasies of re-industrialisation and rearmament. The fact that the US and European armaments industries simply can’t produce what might be needed, though obvious enough, will still come as a terrible shock. Meanwhile, some of the looser cannons will fantasise about Ukrainian governments in exile, recruiting mercenary armies or establishing guerrilla forces in Russia: anything to avoid admitting defeat. Such initiatives would be exceptionally dangerous and will need to be stamped on hard.
Washington will be a particular problem here, because in policy terms it’s an anarchic swamp where any and all proposals, no matter how extreme and bizarre, can be found somewhere. There are so many players, so many interest groups and so much money that we can be pretty sure that, as the cold and clammy realisation of defeat sinks in, the most bizarre and ridiculous proposals will be floated. The problem—and it’s not specific to the Russians—is the tendency of other nations to take everything that comes from the US literally, and to fail to separate the reasonably coherent and potentially acceptable ideas from the dross and garbage produced by idiots in search of funding. There’s some evidence that the Russians (like others it must be said) massively over-estimate the degree of consensus and central control in Washington, and so treat seriously ideas that informed insiders dismiss as junk. So it’s quite likely that in the next few years some intern at a minor think tank will come up with a clever plan to station hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles along the Russian frontier. The plan will be instantly forgotten, but the Russians, over-interpreting things as usual, will probably freak out.
We don’t need this. Getting through the next 5-10 years in one piece is going to be a challenge, and requires careful and thoughtful management of an angry, powerful and suspicious Russia. Now all we need is a western political class capable of doing that. Any idea where we can get one from?
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